Starfist: A World of Hurt (24 page)

So far he hadn't been disappointed. Flying UAVs was as much fun as he'd thought it would be, so much so that he didn't even mind all the hours he had to put in on maintaining the birds--or listening to his team leader repeating instructions he knew well enough to recite in his sleep.

He did his best to forget fighting the Skinks on Kingdom.

He enjoyed the swooping flight of the mock Joseph's coated papukaijas. The birds had evolved for short flights in the upper canopy, with short forays into the understories, but they were capable of extended journeys so long as they could make frequent stops. These two papukaijas were launched from the UAV tower and glided several kilometers, using their wings only occasionally to move from updraft to updraft. They didn't follow a straight path from the launch tower to their destination. Instead, they zigged and zagged from copse to copse, and stopped for occasional "rests."

Similarly, the "thrushmockers" that launched when the "papukaijas" were halfway to their area of operations, wings beating constantly, flitted this way and that as though snatching insectoids on the fly, and stopped to perch now and again.

The UAVs reached their AO near enough to simultaneously be in coordinated formation, but with just enough staggering to appear natural and random to an observer. Surely if that hypothetical observer noticed that they seemed to be paired--one papukaija and one thrushmocker in each pair--the pairing would seem random. By then Lance Corporal Hawker was droning his instructions aloud in harmony with Staff Sergeant Geiger's repetition.

The four birds perched on the topological crest of the strange valley's walls and cocked their heads from side to side, swiveled about, aiming one eye here, one eye there, looking over the terrain.

Back in the operations center, Geiger and Hawker studied their displays, paying particular attention to the visual and infra views. Hawker's eyes widened at the sight of the lush vegetation that spread before them, and it made him eager to fly his papukaijas over and into the canopy. Geiger likewise noted the lushness with pleasure, but he also noticed the absence of birds flying above it. Both noticed that no large, heat-producing bodies were visible in infra, and the motion detectors showed nothing that indicated moving masses that couldn't be accounted for by air currents in the trees.

"Let's do it," Geiger murmured. He pushed a button, and one at a time the thrushmockers launched themselves into the air and darted, wings flitting, into the trees.

Next to him, Hawker also pushed a button, and a second after Geiger's birds, the two papukaijas flung themselves off the cliff edge and spread their wings to swoop on the air currents above the treetops.

"Where is everybody?" Hawker suddenly blurted.

"It's about time you noticed we aren't crashing somebody's party," Geiger came back.

"Turn on your proximity sensors and threat detectors."

"Aye aye," Hawker replied, tapping the commands into his console. "This is weird. Did you ever see empty air like this anywhere before?"

"Once," Geiger said, keeping most of his attention on his displays. "On an exploratory world that wasn't ready for human habitation. We were searching for lost prospectors who weren't supposed to be there in the first place. Photosynthesis hadn't had enough time to pump sufficient oxygen into the atmosphere, and avians hadn't evolved yet."

"That's different, that's a young planet. What about one like this, a world that has birds, with an area where there aren't any fliers?"

"Only where local conditions make the atmosphere poisonous." Geiger checked his displays. "That's not the situation here; that air's breathable."

Hawker flew one of his UAVs higher and ratcheted up its visuals, then coasted the bird in a circular pattern. "Plenty of birds in the sky," he murmured, "but they're all on the other side of the wall."

"Do you see me?"

Hawker checked a display. "Got you in a pretty picture."

"I'm going to the deck for a closer look. Watch me."

The two fake thrushmockers had been flitting through the middle canopy; after the first few minutes, Geiger had stopped their insectoid-catching charade--there didn't seem to be any flying insectoids in the middle canopy. The two disguised UAVs, nearly a quarter klick apart, darted groundward. Neither landed. Instead they flew just a meter above the ground, as slowly as possible for a thrushmocker. Their infras showed nothing but the faint background glow of the rotting vegetation that covered the ground. Light gathering visuals showed what looked like the normal detritus that blanketed a deciduous forest floor: leaves, twigs, rotted branches, bark flakes, trailing vines, with saplings and weeds poking through all over, straining to reach sunlight.

Geiger checked Hawker's displays, then asked, "See anything odd on my visuals?"

Hawker looked at the other's visual displays for a moment and shook his head. "Looks like a hundred other forests I've flown through."

"Look harder." Geiger flicked his eyes between his own and Hawker's displays while the lance corporal searched his visuals for something out of the ordinary.

"Nothing," Hawker finally said, a question in his tone. Obviously, Geiger saw something and he was missing it.

"No bones," Geiger said. "Animals die in a forest. Their bodies rot away, but bones are left behind because they take longer to decay away or subsume. There are no bones."

"But--"

"The native bones here aren't quite the same as ours, but they decay the same as ours.

And there aren't any in this forest--Wait a minute, what's that?"

One of the thrushmockers veered toward something that poked out of a tangle of vines and shoots. It was the first sign they'd seen of animate life inside the bowl. Geiger double-checked his displays to make sure nothing was lurking nearby, then hovered his UAV about thirty centimeters above and to one side of the protrusion.

"Bone," he whispered. "It's a bone. He magnified the vision of the eye fixed on the bone--it was curved like a rib--and blinked. A tendril had bored through its surface. He looked down the bone, into the tangle of vines. By gathering more light, he was able to peer deeper into the tangle and see more bones underneath the vines. He blinked again; several of the bones seemed to have tendrils poking into them.

Suddenly his view spun about as something struck the UAV from its blind side, then the view went blank. His fingers danced over his console as he looked quickly from display to display--all of the UAV's sensors were down!

As he switched to the other thrushmocker and sent it to the lower canopy, heading toward the dead bird, he asked, "Did you see what hit me?"

"There wasn't anything there!" Hawker squawked. "My motion detector picked up something faint, but there isn't anything where it came from."

"Show me," Geiger snapped. An arrowed line traced on the overview. He simultaneously angled his remaining bird toward the line's point of origin and increased the magnification on the overview. "How could someone get that close without us spotting him?" he demanded--the arrowed line was only ten meters long. Hawker wisely decided against attempting an answer.

The thrushmocker circled above where the overview showed the shot had come from, and Geiger focused all its sensors on the place. Nothing. Not even the highest magnification and light gathering showed any sign of a depression on the ground cover where a body might have lain in ambush.

"Are you sure that's where it came from?" he growled.

"According to the motion detector, that's where."

"Damn," Geiger muttered. He drew a vector through the vine tangle where he'd been examining the bones and the spot where Hawker's motion detector showed the silent shot had come from and beyond, and sent his remaining UAV along it, searching for any sign that the shot originated farther out, or sign of someone withdrawing. "Send one of your birds inside the canopy and follow me," he ordered.

"Aye aye." Hawker left his high papukaija orbiting and dropped his low one into the middle canopy, trailing the thrushmocker.
"Right front!"
he shouted, and threw his UAV into a rapid climb, jinking from side to side in evasive maneuvers.

But his warning was too late as a string of viscous, greenish fluid arced out and spattered the thrushmocker, tumbling it into a tree trunk. The UAV crunched and plopped to the ground.

"It came from that tree!" Hawker sent his bird into an Immelmann, and came out of it swooping at the tree the stream had come from. He didn't see the stringer that barely missed his UAV's tail feathers. Seven meters from the tree he twisted his UAV's body to vertical and spun its wings in a braking rotation. The wings blocked his peripheral vision, and he didn't see the second streamer that hit his UAV's side, spinning it out of control. A third streamer blinded it and sent it careening toward the ground.

"Get that last bird out of there,
now!
" Geiger barked.

Hawker canceled his remaining UAV's motion-mimic and sent the false bird climbing for altitude at speed before turning it to head for home.

In little more than two minutes, three of the flight's four UAVs were gone--and they didn't know what had killed them.

In the
Grandar Bay's
real-time intel section, SRA2 Hummfree watched the three Marine UAVs die. He made sure he'd programmed his console for instant replay of what he was watching, then leaned back and rubbed a hand over his eyes. He'd seen the UAVs go down, had even seen faint flickers that might have been the flight paths of whatever it was that killed two of them. What he hadn't seen was anything at the other end of the flight path of the killer.

He leaned forward again and replayed the scene. And replayed it again, and again. But no matter how he diddled the dials and tickled the buttons, no matter how he merged visual, infra, X and gamma ray--it didn't matter that he was able to clarify the flight paths of the killer strokes that took down the UAVs--he couldn't find any signal that would show him the shooter.

He increased the long baseline interferometry he was using from three satellites to four, then five, and finally six. With the resolution he was able to tweak out of that, he could make out individual leaves in the upper canopy. But he still couldn't find the shooters.

What was going on down there?

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Corporal Sonj and Lance Corporals Makin and Zhon flicked off their HUD displays and glanced toward where Sergeant Steffan was squirreled out of sight on the north side of the shallow depression in which the recon team lay hidden; their infra signals were muted. The recon team leader kept his HUD on and reran what he and his men had just observed. The navy's string-of-pearls had relayed scrambled visual signals to them, with infra overlay, from the quartet of disguised UAVs flying through the interdicted area they were about to enter over the ridgetop fifty meters away.

Steffan concentrated, determined not to miss anything that would help them accomplish their mission, anything that would allow them all to report back to the FIST F2, intelligence section, alive and uninjured. He watched as the first fake thrushmocker spun, lost vision, and went dead. He saw the greenish streamer slam into the second thrushmocker and kill it. He shrugged off vertigo as the first papukaija went into its defensive maneuvers, braked to look at the tree the streamer had come from, and then spun out of control itself from a blindside hit before its transmission went blank and died. None of the four UAVs had picked up anything in infra other than the subtle warmth of decaying vegetation on the forest floor. The summary of other data collected showed no movement other than the faint lines of the streamers that killed the three UAVs and another that missed the papukaija. Whoever had shot them down did it from very close proximity to the birds, none much more than ten meters from their targets.

Steffan had seen those greenish streamers before. So had Sonj and Zhon. Makin hadn't; he was one of the new men who joined 34th FIST after the return to Thorsfinni's World from Kingdom. It was the stream from Skink acid guns. Steffan took a slow, deep breath to keep from shivering; the Skink weapons were horrible, but the acid gun was the worst of them. He was glad he and his men were wearing chameleons impregnated with acid neutralizer.

Before they went over that saddle, he'd have to double-check his men to make sure none of them had exposed skin, or poor seals where acid could get inside their uniforms.

He blinked. He was assuming they'd have hot contact with the Skinks, which was the worst thing a recon Marine in this kind of situation could have--detection by the enemy on an intelligence gathering mission usually meant the mission failed.

He knew the Skinks had some sense that allowed them to detect chameleoned Marines, almost as though they could see in infrared. They couldn't see in infrared, though, he knew that. Whatever sense it was that they did have gave them a general location, not the exact position of a Marine invisible in his chameleons. But whatever that sense was, it shouldn't have recognized the disguised UAVs for what they were. Did the Skinks have new equipment, something they hadn't used on Kingdom, that allowed them to see through disguises? Would it allow them to locate the exact position of chameleoned Marines? The Skinks' rail guns had caught the Marines by surprise on Kingdom, so they might have something new now. The team would have to be alert for that possibility.

"Inspection," he said into the team circuit of his helmet comm. Unlike the helmet comms of Marine infantry--which were difficult to intercept because their weak signals wouldn't travel far--Recon's helmet comms used spread-spectrum burst transmissions in addition to weak signals. Moving faster than he had at any time since they'd gotten away from Dragon at their insertion point several kilometers and five hours earlier, Steffan went from Marine to Marine, checking for exposed skin or loose closures on their chameleons.

Good, he thought when he was finished with the inspection. They were all tight, no place for the acid guns to injure them. He checked their weapons while he was at it. All four had their knives and hand-blasters secured, but where they could be quickly and easily drawn.